Michael Shannon and Jeff Nichols just can't stop making movies with each other

Mud director Jeff Nichols has announced his next excuse to hang out with Michael Shannon some more, just kickin’ back and staring intensely at the breeze. This time the director and his muse will join complementarily unsettling forces for an untitled “sci-fi chase film” set in the present day, continuing a working relationship that's also previously included Take Shelter and Shotgun Stories. Not much else is known about the Warner Bros. project, which marks the director’s first for a major studio. Though as Collider points out, Nichols was recently discussing a script called Midnight Special that he likened to “a 1980s John Carpenter movie”—specifically Starman, the quietly bizarre love story where Jeff Bridges plays an alien who impersonates Karen Allen’s dead husband and kidnaps her, and then she falls in love with him anyway because he looks like a young Jeff Bridges. It remains to be seen whether this project and Midnight Special are the same, or if this “chase” is just an excuse for Nichols and Shannon to finally run away together on the studio dime.